Japan's Data Center Boom: 38 Projects by 2030 — and 40% Are Leaving Tokyo and Osaka

Data centers in Japan have always meant Inzai in Chiba and the Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe corridor. That assumption is breaking down in 2026. Tomakomai, Ishikari, Yuzawa, Wakkanai, Oga, Futaba, Satsumasendai — the project list is full of place names that never appeared on Japan's data center map before. This article breaks down the 38 projects and the two tectonic shifts behind them: regional dispersal and the move to liquid cooling.

What did the survey find?

Between April 23 and May 26, 2026, Nikkei xTECH asked roughly 80 companies in the data center business about their construction plans (42 valid responses). The headline results (Nikkei BP):

"Power capacity" here means the maximum electricity a facility can draw from the utility. 100 MW is roughly the demand of a mid-sized city — and considering that 10-30 MW was the domestic norm just a few years ago, per-project scale has jumped an entire tier.

What projects are in the pipeline?

Here are the most notable projects among the 38, by region, drawn from the survey responses (IT denotes IT/server power capacity).

Scanning the list, the 100 MW-plus giants are Colt Minoh (130 MW), NTT DATA's Tokyo TKY12 (~200 MW) and Tochigi TCG11 (100 MW), SC Zeus's ZEUS OSA1 (100+ MW), and SoftBank's Osaka Sakai (expanding beyond 140 MW). Tomakomai starts at 50 MW but plans to grow past 300 MW.

The Inzai cluster in Chiba remains as strong as ever, with five or more entries — NRT14, TKY11, TKY12, STT Tokyo 2 and IIJ Shiroi. We explain how Inzai became Japan's number one data center town in why Inzai in Chiba became Japan's data center capital (in Japanese).

Why are data centers going up in regional Japan?

Thirteen of the 35 confirmed locations sit outside Tokyo and Osaka — and this dispersal is not a change in taste but a consequence of power constraints. Spare transmission capacity around Tokyo and Osaka has thinned out, and locking in a new 100 MW-class power allocation gets harder every year. In short, data centers have started moving to where the electricity is.

Hokkaido leads the way. SoftBank and IDC Frontier's Hokkaido Tomakomai AI Data Center is one of Japan's largest plans — a roughly 700,000-square-meter site with an ultimate power capacity above 300 MW — designed to run entirely on Hokkaido-generated renewable energy, opening in FY2026 (SoftBank, April 2025). In Ishikari, Sakura Internet has operated since 2011, and Kyocera Communication Systems' Zero Emission Data Center Ishikari, opened in October 2024, combines offshore wind and its own solar to achieve Japan's first 24/7 renewable operation (Kyocera CS). The survey adds Tokyu Land's Ishikari Renewable Data Center No. 1 (full operation August 2026) and an NTT East containerized facility — Ishikari is becoming Japan's renewables-times-data-center cluster.

The other current is small containerized GPU data centers. GETWORKS operates liquid-cooled container data centers in Yuzawa, Niigata, scaling toward 110 units (Cloud Watch, February 2026). Toyota Tsusho plans the Soya Container Data Center in Wakkanai and has invested in GPU cloud provider Highreso (which runs sites in Shika, Ishikawa and Takamatsu, Kagawa) (Toyota Tsusho, July 2025). Highreso plans new sites in Oga, Akita and Ayagawa, Kagawa. Using snow and cold air for cooling, building small and fast where the grid has headroom — the exact opposite of the giant-campus model.

For the full picture of where Japan's data centers cluster today, see our national map in Japan Data Center Map: Almost Everything Sits in Just a Dozen Locations.

Why are more than half liquid-cooling-ready?

The survey's other standout finding: more than half of planned facilities support liquid cooling — carrying server heat away directly with liquid. NVIDIA's latest GPU servers dissipate over 100 kW per rack (the cabinet that holds servers), physically beyond what conventional air cooling can remove. KDDI's Osaka Sakai Data Center, live since January 22, 2026, reused the power and cooling infrastructure of the former Sharp Sakai plant to house NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems, compressing a build that normally takes three-plus years into about six months (KDDI).

Liquid cooling changes the building itself. Racks and piping filled with coolant are heavy, and Nikkei xTECH notes a survey-wide trend toward reinforced floor loading (the weight a floor can bear). The data centers now being built are designed AI-server-first — their specs are becoming a different species from conventional facilities. We explain why air cooling hit its limit in why AI servers can no longer be cooled by air (in Japanese).

Is there enough power? The boom's binding constraint

What decides whether all 38 projects get built is not money or land — it is electricity. According to a CRIEPI report analyzing demand projections from OCCTO (Japan's grid coordination organization), data center growth alone will add roughly 6.16 GW of peak demand by FY2034 versus FY2024 — equivalent to about six large nuclear reactors — and about 44 TWh of annual consumption (CRIEPI, 2025).

In the United States, data center power consumption has already become a source of local backlash and a political issue (70% of Americans do not want a data center next door, in Japanese). Japan's regional dispersal can be read as a preemptive move around that friction: build where renewables are abundant, deliver jobs and tax revenue locally, and go to the power source rather than waiting for grid upgrades. As we covered in why an AI data center takes three years from groundbreaking to power-on (in Japanese), the time from construction start to energization is the real bottleneck — which is why projects with secured power allocations keep gaining value.

Japan's 2026 data center construction boom marks the first phase in which the answer to "where do we build?" has changed to "wherever the electricity is." With Colt Minoh and NTT DATA TKY12 slated for 2030, the pipeline is already full five years out (Nikkei xTECH survey).